What happens afterwards?

How will this affect other products that the Wikimedia Foundation is developing?

The research carried out will help bring more understanding to search and discovery mechanisms across all platforms, and user flows from readers to editors and will inform decisions made on how to improve those mechanisms on desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps, as well as in specific products like VisualEditor.

We also are exploring API usage, best practices, mix of content from inter-wiki projects like Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Commons and more, and utilization of open data sources like OpenStreetMap to expand contextual knowledge discovery.

We will, of course, be publishing our research, so that it may be read and taken into account by the broader movement and other interested parties.

What does your overall strategy look like ?

Presentation from Discovery dept.

In late 2015 the Discovery department set out a 3 year strategy plan.

Year 0 - Look inward and improve the search experience across our projects

Year 1 - Look outward and see if we can incorporate new data streams and public curation models for relevance

What does year 0 include ?

We call year 0 Discovery because we are focused on learning and understanding user pathways and appreciation for other knowledge sources.

What does year 1 include ?

Actively highlight difficult to find knowledge and empower the ability to surface it in search, reading and editing flows

Research open sources of knowledge to continually strengthen the legitimacy of our content through curation by humans and machines

This feels like a huge long term project. Is it?

Our users interested in search request a lot of improvements: inter wiki, multi-lingual, media search [1][2], improving UX, improving search relevance, and others. The Discovery Department aims to improve search in these areas, and that will take a lot of time! During this process, we will continually re-evaluate our plans on a quarterly and annual level to assess our impact and hold ourselves to the same standards as any other team at the Wikimedia Foundation.

How do you know if we are succeeding for our users?

Will there be any element of human curation?

We'd like to explore this and need your help on our RFC to think through how to do it right.

I'd like to see a list of search results. Can the department provide this information?

This is a common question by editors and researchers alike. The idea of providing a list of queries where a page does not exist was researched and determined to be to difficult to accomplish with our resources. The biggest concerns were ensuring privacy, the difficulty in creating a usable list out of many junk queries, and the time it would take to create such a list would be costly.